What Emotion Catches Your Ear’s Attention? How anxiety affects what you hear

Deanna Sharpe – deannas0730@gmail.com

Instagram: @deanna._.s
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 30058, United States

Mishaela DiNino
dinino@buffalo.edu
University at Buffalo

Popular version of 1pPP13 – Auditory Emotional Attention in Anxiety Disorders
Presented at the 190th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://eppro01.ativ.me/web/page.php?page=IntHtml&project=ASASPRING2026&id=4082942

–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–

Imagine you’re eating with your friend, when you both suddenly get distracted by someone angrily arguing with their date. The conversation captured your attention due to its emotional content. This attention-grabbing experience of an angry conversation may intensify for those with anxiety disorders.

In hearing, auditory selective attention refers to the process of focusing on one sound while suppressing attention to other sounds. This is important for hearing speech in noise and focusing on conversations in social settings. Exploring how anxiety may affect auditory attention is critical to understanding how anxiety disorder symptoms affect everyday social situations.

Generalized anxiety disorders are characterized by excessive, clinically significant worry, whereas social anxiety disorders are marked by persistent fear or anxiety about social situations (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). People with anxiety disorders tend to have attention biases, especially in response to threat.

Figure 1. Visualization of Auditory Emotional Attention Process.

For example, research with visual stimuli, such as written words, demonstrates that individuals with anxiety exhibit an attention bias toward negative stimuli over neutral or positive stimuli (Fox, 1993; Yiend & Mathews, 2001). However, much less is known about a potential bias to sound in anxiety disorders. Negative emotion in speech can be conveyed through rhythm, stress, and intonation, otherwise known as prosody (Ladd, 2008). So, if individuals with anxiety disorders are biased toward negative sounds, like angry voices, that could interfere with auditory selective attention, making it difficult for them to follow conversations when others speak around them.

In this study, young adults listened to a target sentence while ignoring a second sentence played simultaneously. In the “Emotional Target” condition, the target sentence was spoken with emotional prosody (happy, sad, or angry-sounding), with a neutral (no prosody) distractor sentence. In the “Emotional Distractor” condition, the target was neutral, whereas the distractor was emotional. Additionally, participants completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7) (Spitzer et al., 2006) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) (Heimberg et al., 1992). We expected that individuals with greater symptom severity for generalized and social anxiety would have more difficulty attending to neutral speech while ignoring emotional speech.

Figure 2. Auditory Emotional Attention Task Instructions.

Figure 3. Emotional Target Example.

Instead, our findings demonstrated that people with greater generalized anxiety disorder symptoms performed significantly better on both conditions of the task. Individuals with higher levels of social anxiety symptoms also demonstrated significantly better performance on the Emotional Target condition. While these results don’t align with our hypothesis, they are consistent with increased vigilance in anxiety disorders (Bögels & Mansell, 2004; Vassilopoulos, 2005).

Our study findings suggest that individuals with generalized anxiety and social anxiety disorders experience greater auditory salience to emotionally prosodic stimuli. This means they’re better able to both attend to and ignore emotional stimuli than are individuals without these disorders. Thus, further research on auditory emotional attention will help understand attentional bias and provide insight into the treatment of anxiety disorders.

But until then, the next time you’re in a noisy room, consider which sounds capture your attention!

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
Bögels, S. M., & Mansell, W. (2004). Attention processes in the maintenance and treatment of social phobia: Hypervigilance, avoidance and self-focused attention. Clinical Psychology Review, 24(7), 827–856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2004.06.005
Fox, E. (1993). Allocation of visual attention and anxiety. Cognition and Emotion, 7(2), 207–215.
Heimberg, R. G., Mueller, G. P., Holt, C. S., Hope, D. A., & Liebowitz, M. R. (1992). Assessment of anxiety in social interaction and being observed by others: The Social Interaction Anxiety Scale and the Social Phobia Scale. Behavior Therapy, 23(1), 53–73.
Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed). Cambridge university press.
Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: The GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097.
Vassilopoulos, S. P. (2005). Social anxiety and the vigilance-avoidance pattern of attentional processing. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 33(1), 13–24.
Yiend, J., & Mathews, A. (2001). Anxiety and attention to threatening pictures. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 54(3), 665–681.